Learning ESL in a Canadian senior-public school: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study

This dissertation, based on a 15-month ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of English as a Second Language (ESL) learning in a Senior Public school in Toronto, examines how students learning ESL are subject to institutional relations of power and asks whether and to what extent ESL student practices reproduce these unequal power relations.; In this dissertation I draw on two overlapping senses of the concept of 'practice' as it is used in anthropology and in theories of second language acquisition. The first sense of practice comes directly from an interactionally-based model of second language acquisition. Proponents of this model argue that the acquisition of language skills results from learners practicing the target language. In this dissertation I examine the social factors that affect ESL students' ability to practice speaking English, both in the classroom as well as outside the classroom among 'peers' in situations where other languages are potentially spoken. The second sense of practice comes from contemporary social theory, where scholars seek to understand the complex role of practices in the (re)production of social and cultural structures. This dissertation examines the mechanisms by which the unequal social relations between minority and majority language speakers in Canada are reproduced through everyday practices. I show how ESL students' ability to practice speaking English is subject to the teacher's institutional mandate to control student activities (including talk) in the ESL classroom setting. In other words, ESL students' ability to learn English (and by extension their ability to access the power that this dominant variety represents) is systematically limited by the teacher's power to control talk in the classroom.; I also examine the role that ESL students, as a subordinated group, play in the reproduction of power structures. I found that ESL students act in ways that indicate recognition of the unequal structures of power to which they are subjugated. Furthermore, ESL students often draw on and reproduce these power inequities in interactions with other ESL students. However, at other times ESL students act in ways which appear to evade the power relations which constrain the process of learning ESL in this school setting.